Can simulating the public transit experience of individuals with mild visual impairments promote empathy in design college students, thereby facilitating their design decisions? The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of a mixed empathy intervention (role-playing and experiential prototyping) on improving design students' empathic ability and design decisions. The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) and a Design Decision Questionnaire (DDQ) were used to evaluate the empathy and design decision-making of design students (n = 51). Paired sample t-tests, Pearson correlation, and linear regression were used for quantitative analysis of the intervention effects, combined with text mining techniques. Key findings include: 1) The empathy intervention significantly improved students' empathy levels (t = -2.976*); 2) The cognitive empathy level of students was enhanced (t = -2.276*), specifically in terms of cognitive dimensions, depth, and breadth; 3) The empathy intervention significantly affected students' views on the importance of related design elements (t = -2.958*); 4) Empathy improvement explained around 36.5% of the variation in design decisions. These findings suggest that during a design practice and education method, role-playing and experiential prototyping can not only help students understand the target users but also enhance their consciousness on design service, thus upgrading their design decisions.